As we change to the Common Core Standards, I find that I keep asking myself questions like... "What is my job?" Today, my answer is simple, my job is to get my fifth graders to think harder and understand more. If I can get the kids to think differently than they have before then they will have a true understanding of what they are learning. Although my answer is simple, it doesn't mean it is always an easy thing to do.
I have done my job when I can get students to study the abolitionist John Brown and they can come to the conclusion that the world needs people that are willing to stand up for what they believe in or nothing will ever change. I didn't just ask them to tell me who John Brown was, they need to be able to figure out why he is a significant person in our history.
Common Core isn't about making things more complicated, but it is about making things more challenging. We aren't going to prepare our kids for the future by asking them to memorize steps and facts. It's okay for school to be challenging and it's okay to change the way we teach. We often hear, "What's wrong with the way we learned?" Nothing is wrong with the way we learned years ago, but we live in a different world now. You wouldn't teach a child how to learn Spanish and then send him to France. We have to teach in order to prepare them for a very different world and that mean critical thinking and problem solving.
Well said Megan!
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